Memories vivid 60 years after deadly train crash in Erie County

Wendy Sherman looks at a signed jacket her classmates gave her in the hospital after she was involved in a fatal train crash in western Erie County on March 27, 1953. Wendy was a senior at Academy High School in Erie at the time, and was on her way to Florida to visit her grandparents when the crashed occured. Wendy was photographed at her Millcreek Township home on March 20. JARID BARRINGER/ERIE TIMES-NEWS

Yacklon, 18, was on his way back to the U.S. Navy training facility in Great Lakes, Ill., after spending two weeks at home in Westfield, N.Y.

Baker, 17, was heading to North Miami, Fla., to visit her grandparents during her spring break from Academy High School.

Yacklon caught a New York Central Railroad passenger train, heading from Buffalo to Chicago, in Westfield and took a seat near the back of the car.

Baker caught the train in Erie and sat with some people her father knew.

The train's diesel-electric engines set off from Erie with 11 cars in tow at 9:36 p.m. on Friday, March 27, 1953.

It made it as far as Springfield Township.

A freak accident set off by falling pieces of pipe caused the westbound train to derail and crash into the back half of a westbound freight train on a neighboring track. An eastbound passenger train hit some of the wreckage and derailed.

The three-train crash killed 21 people and injured 49 others, including Yacklon and Baker.

Railroad officials called the accident a "one-in-a-million shot." It ripped up four sets of track and left a mountain of mangled metal in a remote area of western Erie County accessible by one two-lane road.

Authorities estimated the damage at $3 million, or a little more than $26 million in today's dollars.

There's little evidence of the accident at the scene today. The railroad corridor where the trains collided, which once handled more than 30 passenger trains and many more freight trains a day, is now part of the CSX line where two passenger trains and about 60 freight trains pass daily, said Ken Springirth, a local railroad historian and rail transit author.

But the memories of the deadly crash remain vivid for those touched by it 60 years ago today.

"Just seeing the carnage, the wreckage ... it was awesome, it was disaster," said Girard historian Caroline Veith, 75.

A fateful trip

Wendy Sherman, then Wendy Baker, said her father booked her trip to Florida on the train because he thought it was a safer way to travel than flying.

After boarding the train at the Erie station on the cold and rainy evening of March 27, 1953, Sherman said she sat talking to a few people when, about a half-hour into the trip, the train started rumbling.

"Apparently that's when everything hit and went off the tracks," she said. "I must have been hit by luggage, something from above. I don't remember the exact impact, but I do remember the train car was dark and I guess I sat there a little bit."

Yacklon was talking to a pregnant woman who was also from Westfield after the train pulled out of Erie. He then went to his seat and was checking his papers when the train started shifting, he said.

"All of a sudden it got rough, and I went forward and hit my head. My legs went under the seat and were cut. I was pinned under the seat," Yacklon said. "After that, everything was dark."

The accident occurred at 10:02 p.m. when the train, traveling at 76 mph, jumped its track about 560 yards from the Pennsylvania-Ohio line. The locomotive and 10 of the cars derailed and collided with a westbound freight train that was traveling at 31 mph, according to a report by the Interstate Commerce Commission.

The crash caused 16 of the freight train's 120 cars to derail. Some of the passenger train's derailed cars blocked a neighboring track and were hit seconds later by another passenger train that was heading east at 71 mph. The locomotive and the first nine passenger cars of that train derailed, according to the report.

James Wenner, a 25-year-old Pennsylvania State Police trooper stationed out of the West Springfield barracks, headed out to State Line Road with another trooper after they got word of the accident.

"The wreck was blocking the crossing on State Line Road, and most of it was to the east of there. Needless to say it was mass confusion," Wenner said.

Merle Wood, 23 years old and fresh from the service, was watching the 11 p.m. news at home with his family when they learned of the train accident. The report led viewers to believe that the crash happened in Conneaut, Ohio, and Wood said he doesn't recall if it included any reports of fatalities.

When the news ended, Wood and his father, Erie County Coroner Warren Wood, went to bed, he said.

A shocking scene

A lot of people reached the accident scene before Wenner and his fellow state police trooper, and State Line Road was so clogged with traffic that it was hard for police, ambulances and other emergency crews to get through, he said.

Yacklon managed to free himself from under the seat and climbed out of the train.

"I saw that we were in bad trouble," he said. "I could see great, big pipes that were under the train we had hit. I was helping people as much as I could, even though my leg and back had been injured."

Sherman crawled out of one of the windows of her train car. Someone helped her, but she said she didn't see anyone around her.

"It was a long wait (for rescue crews). I know there were people in the same car I was in that were killed," she said.

Wenner said he walked to the accident scene with a doctor, and he tried to help free people who were trapped in train cars.

"There was a fellow trapped in the wreckage who couldn't get out. He was badly injured and subsequently passed away. The doctor gave me a needle and said to give (the man) a shot -- I assume it was morphine -- and I did," he said. "It was a new experience for me."

Relief trains were dispatched from Cleveland and Buffalo as ambulances tried to make their way down traffic-clogged State Line Road to the scene.

Many of the injured were placed on trains and were taken to hospitals in Erie, Ashtabula and Conneaut. Sherman said she remembers waiting on a stretcher for some time before she was taken aboard a train that headed for Erie's Union Station.

"A lot of people had family members who had no idea if their loved ones were OK or not. When the train did come back to Erie, my father was there. There were a lot of family members waiting at the train station," she said.

Sherman was taken to Hamot Hospital.

Yacklon was placed in an ambulance and was driven to the Veterans Hospital in Erie.

"Someone reported that I was dead," Yacklon said. "When (my family) came out there, they expected to see a dead body."

Merle Wood's father woke him up at 4 a.m. on March 28. One of Warren Wood's deputy coroners called and asked where he was, as others were waiting for him at the site of the train crash.

No one had called his father to report any deaths or the need for the coroner, but somehow some of the deputies heard about the accident and went to the scene, Wood said.

Wood and his father reached the crash about an hour later, after parking their car on a nearby road and walking along the tracks.

"I had never seen anything like that before, just piled up all over, the railroad cars and everything else. It was a mess," he said.

Wood's father sent him back to Erie to set up the morgue, which was then located in a building between West 24th and 25th streets, west of Peach Street. He took the hearses out of the building and laid paper on the floor in preparation for the arrival of the dead, who were brought back to Erie by train.

"We didn't know how many were dead when we got (to the accident) until they started working through the wreckage. By that time I had left," Wood said.

Wood enlisted a few other men to help drive the hearses that brought the bodies from the train station to the morgue.

Caroline Veith heard ambulances passing by her home in Girard during the night, but didn't think anything of it. The traffic continued the next morning, and Veith went with her father to investigate.

"My family was in the railroad, and at different times I had gone with my family to see (accidents). But this was unbelievable," she said. "It was just ... people walking around in a daze."

The aftermath

Killed in the crash were the westbound passenger train's assistant conductor; and its brakeman, James A. Lewis, 30, a former Erie resident who had moved to Cleveland four years earlier. An express messenger and two people listed in the Interstate Commerce Commission's report as "other employees" were also killed.

The 16 passengers who died in the accident included three Erie residents: Tom Henderson, 43, of Wayne Street, a railroad laborer who left behind a wife and nine siblings; Grace Cutri, 58, of Brown Avenue, whose husband, Joseph, was injured in the crash; and Ethel Quinn, 36, of East 17th Street, who was heading to Jackson, Miss., with her grandson and a friend. She left behind a husband and two sons.

Wood was at the morgue when his father told him that a funeral director from Westfield, N.Y., would be stopping by for a death certificate for a person who had died in Erie. When the funeral director arrived, he mentioned that his brother, who lived in Niagara Falls, hadn't heard from his wife and daughter, who were on the passenger train. The funeral director looked through the bodies and found his sister-in-law and niece, Wood said.

All but one of the bodies were quickly identified and claimed, Wood said. The last, a 27-year-old woman from Chicago, was identified two days later.

"We had a lot of cooperation from funeral directors because no one was prepared in Erie to take care of that many at the time," Wood said. "As they were identified they were sent to different funeral homes to do the preparations to transport to wherever they were supposed to go."

About 50 train policemen were sent to the accident scene to keep away crowds of people who continued to come, while more than 400 laborers worked to repair and reopen the tracks, the Erie Daily Times reported.

The Interstate Commerce Commission and the Pennsylvania Public Utilities Commission met in Erie the next week to conduct hearings into the possible causes of the accident -- the worst in the U.S. since two Southern Railway System trains collided in Alabama in November 1951, killing 17 and injuring 53, the Erie Daily Times reported.

Investigators ruled out excessive train speeds before determining that the crash was set off when some improperly-secured steel pipe on the 73rd car of a 103-car, eastbound freight train fell off the car and hit the neighboring track, damaging it. The westbound passenger train was traveling on that track and derailed when it hit the damaged portion, the report's authors concluded.

The rail corridor was reduced from four lanes to two in 1956, when the railroad installed centralized traffic control, Springirth said.

Yacklon, 78, returned to the Navy after he was released from the hospital and served for four years. He eventually moved to Rochester, N.Y., where he still lives.

Wenner, 85, was based out of the state police barracks in West Springfield, and then Girard, until 1963, when he moved to the Lawrence Park barracks. He was later promoted and transferred to Lancaster, where he retired in 1979. Wenner still lives in Lancaster.

Wood, 83, started mortuary school less than two weeks after the train crash, and fielded many questions from his professors about what he had experienced. He followed his father as Erie County Coroner and served 40 years before retiring in 1999.

Sherman, 77, spent a month in Hamot Hospital, recovering from a broken pelvis and a broken nose. A friend made her a white jacket with a red checkered lining, and many of her classmates wrote messages on it.

Despite her long stay in the hospital, Sherman, a senior at Academy High School, managed to graduate with her class.

The Millcreek Township resident still has the jacket.

"I never did get back down to Florida to see my grandparents," she said.

TIM HAHN can be reached at 870-1731 or by e-mail. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/ETNhahn.